Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

“Why do you want to help me?” I asked.

“I’ve never seen you care about something before,” she said. The answer came so easily for her, I wondered if she’d been waiting for the question.

“I care about you,” I replied.

“It’s different now,” she said.

I supposed it was, but I didn’t want to get into it then. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to. I nodded in what I hoped was a deep, introspective way, and went to get her the rental agreement. I felt her eyes on me the whole way, but this time I didn’t look back.

***

Carol’s apartment had the same floor plan as mine, but that’s where the similarities ended. It was decorated like some kind of frilly country cottage, with yellow walls, white trim, and everything she could afford from the Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn catalogs.

She’d replaced all the door knobs and drawer handles and faucet fixtures with replicas of old-fashioned stuff, and every surface in her place had some kind of cutesy accessory, whether it was the colorful oven-mitts on the kitchen counter, the napkins in their special holder on the table, or the seat covers on all the chairs.

There were also plug-in air fresheners in every electrical outlet, which made the whole apartment smell so strongly of pine sap, I felt like I was visiting an upscale tree house.

Ordinarily, I felt uncomfortable in her apartment and fled as soon as possible. But this time, I was concentrating so much on her computer screen, I was oblivious to my environment.

First, I used a search engine to see what I could find on the Internet about Lauren Parkus. I found lots of articles, mostly local society columns, about parties and fundraisers she either organized or had attended. The events were always very pricey affairs for good causes at five-star hotels, and the guest lists usually included some movie stars, major sports figures, and big corporate leaders.

There were also a few pictures of her. Each time one came up on screen, it startled me. Her eyes always looked so alive. Of course, nothing about her was alive any more.

Cyril Parkus was often in the photographs with his wife, a big, proud smile on his face. He seemed so glad to be there, as if he was having such a good time battling cancer, illiteracy, lupus, sudden infant death syndrome, teenage drug addiction, and pollution of our groundwater. They were just parties to him—I think they were more to Lauren, or at least I wanted to believe they were. He also held her in a possessive kind of way that declared, I get to take her home and fuck her and you don’t.

I looked up Cyril Parkus. There were even more articles about him than his wife, mostly business pieces about the financial side of the movies. Apparently he was a major player in the international sale and distribution of movies. Anytime there was an article about the field, he was the expert they quoted. I guess he qualified as an “industry leader.” I figured it was his stature in the business that got so many people to contribute and participate in the charities Lauren was involved in.

Just for the hell of it, I tried looking up Arlo Pelz in a few of those Internet phone book and “find your lost friend, lover, or relative” websites, but came up empty. I also ran my name on those same sites, and wasn’t surprised that nothing turned up for me, either. We were both as irrelevant in cyberspace as we were in the real world.

But I was going to find him, somehow, and I was going to make him pay for blackmailing Lauren Parkus and driving her to commit suicide. I also intended to get him back for kicking the piss out of me.

Intention and ability are two very different things.

I wasn’t martial artist or a boxer. I had no self-defense skills at all, unless you include running and hiding. The last actual fistfight I’d been in was in the fourth grade and it went a lot like that fight in the elevator, with the other guy doing all the hitting and kicking and me doing all the crying.

I didn’t have time to find a master of the ancient art of Sinanju and learn how to turn a napkin into a lethal weapon.

If I wanted to take Arlo, it couldn’t be a fair fight. I needed an edge.

With that in mind, the next thing I did was go back to the search engine and type in the phrases: “‘Realistic toy gun’ AND ‘police shooting.’” The search engine coughed up a couple hundred articles about police officers shooting kids and morons who pointed fake guns at them. I scanned the articles and narrowed my search until I found the brand name and model of toy gun that did the best job of fooling the police and getting kids and morons killed.

It was an exact, plastic replica of a Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol that fired BBs. I found the manufacturer’s website and learned they also made detailed replicas of just about every other pistol, machine gun, and rifle you could imagine.

The air-fired BB guns were intended mostly for target shooting, but were also used a lot in movie and TV production as stand-ins for the real thing. By law, the replica guns came with a bright orange tip on the barrel so they couldn’t be mistaken for genuine firearms. But it wasn’t hard to break the tip off, or paint it, and trick someone holding a real weapon into shooting you five or six times.

The fake Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol sold for about forty bucks, a fraction of the cost of a real one, and required no license or waiting period. All you had to be was over twenty-one years old and gun crazy.

That’s when Carol called, excitement in her voice. She’d discovered that the credit card Arlo Pelz used was shared with his wife, Jolene, that the card was officially in her name, and that the bills were sent to her in Snohomish, Washington, which was just outside Seattle.

I got a chill up my back, just like the one I got when Bruce Willis saw the wedding ring drop out of his wife’s hand in The Sixth Sense.

I checked the article about Lauren Parkus’ suicide again, to be sure the chill I felt wasn’t lightheadedness from inhaling all that pine air freshener. It wasn’t. The article said Lauren’s mother lived in Seattle.

I got the chill again and told Carol why. I think I heard her swallow a squeal. It was kind of like we were having phone sex, saying the things we knew would get the other person off.

“If anybody finds out what I was doing, I could get fired for this, but I don’t care,” Carol admitted, her hushed voice tittering with excitement. “It was fun.”

She’d discovered my awful secret. Snooping was a thrill, so much so that she’d easily forgotten the dark side, the whole reason she was looking into Arlo Pelz for me: somebody died. I didn’t have the heart to remind her. Carol did me a favor; she deserved to enjoy it.

“You have something else I can do?” she whispered conspiratorially.

I told her there wasn’t and thanked her for what she’d found out. I also told her I wouldn’t be around when she got back and that I’d leave her keys in my mailbox.

Then I called my supervisor at the security company, told him I had a horrible stomach flu, and that I’d probably be out for a couple days.

And then I printed out the specs on the Desert Eagle and a list of the manufacturer’s retailers in Seattle.

***

When I got to LAX, I discovered that the airline had overbooked my flight. They were offering four hundred dollars in free travel vouchers to any volunteers who were willing to give up their seats and wait for the next flight to Seattle in three hours.

I wasn’t in a hurry. Lauren Parkus was already dead. Three hours wouldn’t change much. I volunteered my narrow coach seat and five inches of legroom.

I got my free travel voucher and, feeling flush, went to the restaurant and treated myself to one of their eight-dollar-and-ninety-five-cent cheeseburgers and two-fifty Cokes.

It was only while I was sitting there, eating my insanely expensive fast food, that I started thinking about things. First, I wondered how the public allowed airports and movie theatres to charge so goddamn much for food. Then I thought about what I’d do when I got to Seattle.